December 10, 2000

A Realist's PicaresqueAs he repeatedly traverses the line between West and East, Robert D. Kaplan explores the idea of national identity.

By LAURA SECOR

EASTWARD TO TARTARY
Travels in the Balkans,
the Middle East, and the Caucasus. By Robert D. Kaplan.
364 pp. New York:
Random House. $26.95.

obert D. Kaplan would like to show you the world -- from Plovdiv, Bulgaria, to Tbilisi, Georgia, and beyond. He will shuttle you across the Caspian Sea, from Baku to Turkmenbashi, on a squalid freighter where beautiful women in old nightgowns carry ''shopping bags full of evil-smelling food.'' There is just about no place Kaplan, a prolific travel writer and political journalist, hasn't visited. Erudite and intrepid, with a pantheon of elite contacts all over the world, he is a deft guide to wherever he chooses to lead you.

But ''Eastward to Tartary'' is not only an account of Kaplan's travels in the Balkans, the Middle East and the Caucasus. It is also a revealing study of what Kaplan frequently calls the ''new Silk Roads'' now winding through formerly closed lands. Caspian oil, Kaplan predicts, and the pipelines that will funnel it to the West, are about to wreak enormous changes in this part of the world, already shattered by the fall of the Soviet Union. ''What the Balkans were to the 1990's,'' Kaplan writes, ''the Caspian region might be to the first decade of the new century: an explosive region that draws in the Great Powers.''

But be forewarned: Kaplan is not a disinterested guide. He is a realist, on the model of Henry Kissinger. Self-interest and power politics govern affairs of state, Kaplan admonishes, and it's for the best that they do: ''Self-interest at its healthiest implicitly recognizes the self-interest of others, and therein lies the possibility of compromise. A rigid moral position admits few compromises.'' Consistent with this view is Kaplan's contention that authoritarian regimes are often preferable to weak democracies. In the countries he visits, Kaplan claims, ''civil society will likely be introduced only by force and Machiavellian tactics.'' If we want to see Western ideals, not to mention vital American interests, protected in these regions, he maintains, we must be prepared to exercise a strong economic and military hand.

Inevitably, this outlook raises disturbing moral questions: How can competing self-interests in, say, the Middle East be reconciled without considerations of principle and justice? Why recommend for others a form of government we would find unacceptable for ourselves? And Kaplan never explains what would compel authoritarian governments to undermine themselves by building democratic institutions. The hard-nosed realism with which he regards fledgling democracies seems to soften when he considers the motives of dictators or the negotiability of power, blood, lust and greed. Elections, he rightly notes, have brought nationalist demagogues to power in places like Bosnia. But so have military coups, civil wars, foreign interventions and other nondemocratic means. True, democracies abroad could produce leaders, and politics, we dislike. But this is perhaps the single worst reason to oppose them.

Despite Kaplan's avowed commitment to realist precepts, ''Eastward to Tartary'' often seems animated by a more troubling view of the world. Something Kaplan calls ''national character'' plays a significant role in his analysis. The notion of collective national identity is, he recognizes, unpopular among intellectuals. ''However, a viewpoint is not necessarily inaccurate because it happens to be morally risky and pessimistic,'' he says, ''especially if it helps explain phenomena that are otherwise unexplainable.''

But national identity turns out to be an exceedingly weak explanatory tool. Kaplan relays in all seriousness the following comment from one of his contacts: ''In Georgia, a civil war was necessary because of the kind of people we are. The real cause of the war is our medievalness.''

His depiction of Stalin as an ''Oriental'' despot ''from the Caucasus mountains, where Russia ends and the Near East begins,'' is equally fatuous: ''To say that the Oriental influence was merely incidental to his character is to ignore its essentials. The monumental use of terror, the very grandeur of his personality cult and the use of prison labor for gigantic public works projects echo the ancient Assyrian and Mesopotamian tyrannies.''

Soviet totalitarianism did not originate with Stalin's Oriental character. Nor were its means unique to the East -- Kaplan's description applies equally to that very Western tyrant Adolf Hitler. To be sure, in ''Balkan Ghosts,'' an earlier work from 1993, Kaplan blamed Yugoslavia for Hitler: ''Nazism, for instance, can claim Balkan origins. Among the flophouses of Vienna, a breeding ground of ethnic resentments close to the southern Slavic world, Hitler learned how to hate so infectiously.''

''Eastward to Tartary'' is in part a sequel to ''Balkan Ghosts.'' With its acknowledged debt to Rebecca West, ''Balkan Ghosts'' was a prime example of the genre that scholars of the region call ''Balkanism'': the Western traveler ventures across the frontier of what he or she considers civilization, and finds in the Balkans a land of animal passions, mysticism, violence and sensuality. ''The Balkans'' is a name not for a peninsula in southeast Europe but for Enlightened Europe's id unleashed -- primitive, repellent, titillating. ''This was a time-capsule world: a dim stage upon which people raged, spilled blood, experienced visions and ecstasies,'' Kaplan wrote in 1993.

''Eastward to Tartary'' is a more sophisticated work than ''Balkan Ghosts.'' Kaplan has matured as a stylist and as a political analyst, but he can still describe Turkish political parties as ''chieftaincies'' and rhapsodize about the ''pagan mystery'' and ''dusky sensuality'' underlying Eastern Orthodoxy. East and West are not compass directions for him but categories freighted with imaginative significance. Thus, downtown Budapest is in the West, but its impoverished outskirts lie in the East; Georgia is largely in the East, but its oil terminal and capital city are outposts of the West; rural Azerbaijan is in the East, but its capital, Baku, is ''a little piece of Europe''; and Armenia, despite its geographical location, is in the Balkans. The result is a frustratingly fragmented picture, with a West that cannot have produced Hitler and an East that cannot include rationality or cosmopolitanism.

Such suprageographical divisions recall the work of Samuel P. Huntington, the Harvard political theorist who published a famous article, ''The Clash of Civilizations?,'' in Foreign Affairs in 1993, and turned that article into the book ''The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order'' a few years later. Both Huntington and Kaplan see in the map of the ancient world a set of tectonic plates that move beneath the current one, causing its quakes and upheavals and ultimately determining its fate. For Kaplan, this perspective leads to the impression that history moves backward. As he tells one contact in Lebanon, ''Middle East politics are like those of the ancient world -- a Greek or a Roman could understand them better than an American.'' Envisioning the collapse of Syria and Georgia, new alliances formed along commerce routes, the end of the bipolar Arab-Israeli conflict and the birth of ''more complex systems of strife,'' Kaplan characteristically remarks, ''It would be like ancient times.''

There is a romantic appeal to this picture of history unfurling in reverse, but it unduly minimizes the significance of recent events. The 20th century has, after all, produced more than its own share of bloodshed and conquest. Even in the Balkans, so famously obsessed with ancient history, it is the living memory of World War II that has been recapitulated and manipulated to most malign effect. The rise and fall of empires, the eddies that carry cultural influences across the globe and back again, the contemporary distribution of power and resources among nations, the changing world order outside of Europe, the rise of United States power -- all these things make for a world not cleaved along archaic frontiers but shaped by infinitely complex and layered relationships.

Kaplan's parsing and splitting between the East and the West, as well as his heavy-handed invocation of the distant past, do a disservice to his considerable knowledge of ancient history and his acute observations of the troubles ahead. For he tends to boil away much of the world's subtlety and complexity -- its capacity to be at once sensual and sophisticated, vicious and civilized, shaped by the distant and the recent past, by history but also by politics, by self-interest but also by principle. To integrate all of this into a coherent whole is the great challenge. Should Kaplan attempt it, he might show us a more realistic world than ''Eastward to Tartary,'' for all its discernment, evokes.